Science Parks and Instant Villages: Postmodernism and British Telecom in Thatcher's Britain

This paper explores the aesthetic of ‘place’ and the emergence of science parks in the 1980s through a study of British Telecom Labs in Martlesham Heath, rural England. Above BT Labs’ entrance is a plaque engraved with ‘Research is the Door to Tomorrow’. BT Labs inherited the plaque from its predecessor, the Post Office Research Station, which BT acquired in 1981 after Margaret Thatcher created BT to take over the British telephone system from the Post Office. The research centre was a modernist, corporate lab, designed to emulate the ‘industrial Versailles’ of Bell Labs and General Motors’ Tech Centre, but in the 1980s, amidst a Thatcherist vogue for science parks, it became ‘Adastral Park’, a ‘science campus’ whose name referenced the motto of the Royal Air Force, deliberately evoking Britain’s WWII spirit. Adastral Park, however, is not Martlesham Heath’s only distinctive feature. From 1975, with the promise of new residents from research staff, an ‘instant village’, built like an ‘unspoiled traditional village’, was built on the heath, a postmodern reaction in architecture and town planning against post-war Britain’s ‘new towns’. Martlesham Heath has multiple, contradictory expressions of temporality, and in this paper I argue that the evolution of this corporate laboratory, from modernist Post Office Research Centre to Thatcherist ‘science park’ experiment, invoked history and futurity in ways that turned ‘Martlesham Heath’ from a heathland space into a ‘place’ in its own right, with a past, present, and future.